Back when they called containers "jails", I did both distroless/single-binary and full-install containers. I like the former a lot. They really make it difficult for attackers to live off the land. On the flip side, they're a huge pain in the ass to maintain, particularly if your programming language of choice doesn't make static linking easy.
Nowadays, where system admins aren't usually programmers, doing a full install of an operating system's userland into a chroot---sorry, I mean "layer"---is pretty damn handy. If you're careful about what packages you install, you can get most of the benefits of a distroless container (e.g., making LoL hard) without having to know too much about how the runtime environment works.
It's all a balance, how much time and money you waste engineering the perfect `FROM scratch` container versus getting actual work done using a "fat" image that's good enough. And I think we all know, deep down, that fat OCI images make the Docker world go 'round.